A mom has gone viral on TikTok for sharing how she found out her son had been “red-pilled”, and what she did about it. In case you’re not familiar with the term, “red-pilling,” it refers to men embracing the idea that their unhappiness and failure to “score” is the fault of women and feminists. In short: misogyny.
The parent, who goes by @rchlprkr, spoke about how her son confidently blurted out that “women are gold diggers”. She then explained in detail how she responded to him. And how, in her words, she “successfully ‘de-pilled’ her ‘red-pilled’ son.” The video has been liked more than 279,000 times since it was posted. It’s well worth a watch, even if you aren’t a mom. Or don’t have a son. Bored Panda reached out to Dr. Sarah Lamer, an assistant professor of social psychology who has done extensive research on gender stereotyping. She gave us some advice on how to protect children from harmful misogynistic discourse.
There are many dangers lurking on the internet and one of them comes in the form of “red-pilling”
Image credits: rchlprkr
When one mom realized her son was beginning to pick up misogynistic beliefs from online videos, she dealt with it immediately
Image credits: rchlprkr
Image credits: rchlprkr
You can watch the mom’s whole video here:
Swallow the “red pill” and digest a false narrative that women are to blame for your failures…
Image credits: valeriygoncharukphoto (not the actual photo)
You might remember the idea of the “red pill and blue pill” from the 1999 science fiction blockbuster The Matrix. According to Britannica, “the pills represented a choice between remaining in a state of blissful ignorance (blue) or accepting a painful reality (red).”
But since then, the red pill has taken on a life of its own. “My understanding is that red-pilling refers to a radicalizing paradigm shift, causing someone to think about the world in an entirely different way. In the context of our current political environment, it is most often applied to a conservative paradigm shift,” Dr. Sarah Lamer told Bored Panda when we reached out to her. Lamer is an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She’s done extensive research on gender stereotyping and is considered an expert in the field.
Lamer tells Bored Panda that children learn about gender very early in life. But their ideas about what girls and boys are supposed to do, especially how they are supposed to look, typically become very rigid between 3 and 5 years. “It is also around 5 when children seem to learn about the relative status of women and girls versus men and boys,” says Lamer.
The expert says gender roles are so ingrained in our society that they are socialized strongly in childhood. “Gendered patterns exist everywhere, from clothing to media to how adults talk to girls vs. boys,” she told us.
Being vigilant about the patterns children are seeing is important, says Lamer. “I like to switch the pronouns in children’s books and songs whenever I encounter them. Not only does it reverse the pattern for children, but it also alerts you as the adult to subtle ways that gender stereotypes are getting into children’s environments,” she explained. “For example, are they seeing women in high-status roles? Are they seeing only men as superheroes? Even an imbalance in the distribution of household labor is thought to contribute to children’s gender role beliefs at an early age.”
We asked Lamer how to respond to a young boy saying something like “women are gold diggers”… The expert said she’d challenge the child to walk through their thinking. “The boy acquired that belief from somewhere — perhaps an adult said it, it was mentioned in a television show, or it was shared among peers,” Lamer explained.
“Helping the child understand the illogical nature of the statement (e.g., certainly there are women who are not gold diggers — the boy’s mom, aunt, teacher) and perhaps where they learned that illogical belief (e.g., a single statement or example). Depending on the child’s age, you can also discuss gender stereotypes broadly and some of the problematic ways that women and men are portrayed — e.g., men as emotionally inexpressive or angry and women as oversexualized and objectified.”
The term red-pilling is often associated with alt-right circles and the so-called “manosphere.” If you aren’t familiar with that term, it refers to an international network of social media influencers and online communities that promote male supremacy and antifeminist ideologies. It’s filled with misogyny, toxic masculinity and hateful ideas about women.
Think Andrew Tate, the infamous social media influencer who was arrested on serious charges of crimes against women, and is still on trial, alongside his brother Tristan. “Women should clean up,” Andrew Tate once told his young male followers. “Not only should women clean up, women should clean up unprompted.”
According to a U.S. Congress report, it was statements like these that saw hoards of young men putting Tate on a pedestal. “It didn’t matter if his advice was crude, sexual, or hateful; Tate made a fortune making himself synonymous with the manosphere – a far-right community that recruits susceptible young men with toxic masculinity and misogyny,” reads the report.
Image credits: Julia M Cameron (not the actual photo)
It’s guys like Tate who hand out red pills to anyone who will listen, feeding guys the false narrative that their own failures are not their fault but rather the work of women and feminists. CNN reports that Tate’s TikTok account racked up around 11.6 billion views before it was taken down, and he was banned from the platform.
The government report warns that manosphere influencers use their “isolated and indoctrinated community members” to profit, “often selling self-help and guru-style assistance for a price and to keep a steady revenue stream.” It notes a clear connection between the manosphere community and cryptocurrency traders, saying the group has a profit-driven mindset dubbed “the grindset.”
“Men usually flock to the manosphere because they are unhappy in some way and searching for a sense of belonging, and younger audiences are drawn in by a similar need,” Brette Steele, senior director for Preventing Targeted Violence at the McCain Institute, told CNN.
Steele added that youth are searching for that “sense of belonging, that kind of grounding to explain what’s happening to them.” The expert warned that as more young men turn to the manosphere, “we’ve seen a degradation of in-person social skills, and in middle school, that’s when those social skills are first coming into play.”
Lamer warns that screen time can influence a child’s beliefs. “There are several scientific theories on this, and numerous studies support the idea that what people see in the media impacts their beliefs,” the expert told Bored Panda. “My own research suggests that just a few minutes of exposure to a pattern in children’s television can cause girls to feel more pressure to conform to traditional feminine norms (e.g., playing with ‘girl toys’).”
Lamer says it’s best to err on the side of caution. And try to be proactive in guiding media consumption. “For example, when consuming media, I try to be attentive to gender stereotypical representations and explicitly draw my attention to those biases whether watching something myself or with others,” she explained.
Many commented on how hard it must be to raise boys nowadays
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